CHECKLIST REPORT

2017

Rethinking Enterprise BI to
Fit a Self-Service World
Seven Steps for Improving User Productivity
and Solving Enterprise Governance
and Quality Challenges

By David Stodder

Sponsored by:
 APRIL 2017

T DW I CHECK L IS T RE P OR T TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rethinking Enterprise BI
to Fit a Self-Service World 2 F OREWORD
Seven Steps for Improving User Productivity
and Solving Enterprise Governance and 2 NUMBER ONE
Calibrate the role of IT to fit varied self-service
Quality Challenges requirements

3 NUMBER TWO
Update governance and stewardship to embrace
By David Stodder self-service BI and analytics

3 NUMBER THREE
Revise the semantic layer to support self-service
interactive reporting

4 NUMBER FOUR
Balance standardization and consolidation with
user agility

4 NUMBER FIVE
Introduce self-service data preparation carefully

5 NUMBER SIX
Develop an open architecture to match workloads
with the right technologies

6 NUMBER SEVEN
Refresh training to fit diverse self-service user needs

6 FINAL WORD

7 ABOUT THE SPONSORS

8 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

8 ABOUT TDWI RESEARCH

8 ABOUT TDWI CHECKLIST REPORTS

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TDWI CHECKLIST REPORT: RE THINK ING ENTERPRISE BI TO FIT A SELF-SERVICE WORLD
FOREWORD
Few things are more important to organizations today than
empowering executives, managers, and frontline personnel with
the ability to glean insights from data to make smarter decisions.
Business intelligence (BI) is becoming increasingly democratized,
and realizing value from BI tools is no longer limited to an exclusive
group with technical expertise. Today’s self-service BI and visual
analytics tools are easier to use and offer graphical interfaces that
feature data visualization as the primary means of interacting with
data, providing a range of users with more power and control to
work with data as they see fit.
We are now deep into the self-service BI and analytics revolution.
How does the democratization of self-service BI and analytics fit
with enterprise BI? Many organizations have invested deeply in
enterprise BI and have achieved hard-won success in establishing
a standard for BI and enterprise data warehousing. At its best,
enterprise BI gives users improved data quality and consistency,
which translates into greater user confidence in the reports and
analytics used for strategic and operational decisions. However, the
chief downsides of enterprise BI include inflexibility, restricted data
access, a steep learning curve, and delays in waiting for IT to make
changes or add new data.
This Checklist Report focuses on how organizations can revise and
revitalize enterprise BI in the age of self-service technology. The
self-service genie is not going back in the bottle—self-service BI
and analytics are here to stay. Thus, it is critical for business and
IT leaders to open up enterprise BI and embrace self-service BI and
analytics. Leaders must focus on creating a better data environment
for more independent users. Keeping self-service and enterprise BI
worlds separate will make IT governance more difficult and increase
the obstacles users confront as they pursue fast, easy access to and
interaction with all relevant data.
Rethinking enterprise BI requires openness to new technologies,
data architectures, styles of business/IT collaboration, and
approaches to training and mentoring. It also requires patience—
change can be difficult.
2  TDWI RESE A RCH
NUMBER ONE
CALIBRATE THE ROLE OF IT TO FIT VARIED SELF-SERVICE
REQUIREMENTS
There is no one type of self-service BI and visual analytics. Projects
can come in a variety of shapes and sizes and run the gamut in terms
of IT involvement. At one end of the spectrum are fully business-driven
use cases where tech-savvy power users acquire and employ tools
on their own to analyze and visualize a particular data set, often as
a step up from using personal spreadsheets. At the other end are
business users working with tools to do “fast prototyping,” where they
explore data, collect requirements, and build prototypes for what will
become more substantial applications. Most likely, these applications
will be deployed with IT oversight and governance, if not developed
wholly by IT personnel. Organizations implementing agile development
methods can use fast prototypes created by agile teams (made up of
business and IT personnel) as part of project iteration cycles.
The sheer variety of self-service projects can make it complicated
for business and IT to work together. Traditional enterprise BI
environments have been more straightforward; most users consume
the data, applications, and visualizations that IT produces, usually by
implementing tools selected and deployed by IT. The self-service trend
requires business and IT leadership to be more flexible and calibrate
the amount of IT involvement to fit what users are trying to do.
To facilitate a stronger working relationship, many organizations
establish a center of excellence (CoE) or BI competency center (BICC).
These committees bring together business and IT leaders to work out
project goals, priorities, funding, resource allocation, and governance.
TDWI research finds somewhat mixed results with such committees,
often because it is difficult to sustain business-side involvement.
Even so, with proper attention and championing from business and IT
leadership, the committees can serve an important role.
The main objective for IT should be to adopt an enabler role and help
users achieve their goals by guiding them to the right data, advising
how they can get the most out of the tools, and helping to scale up
applications. Because users and projects vary across organizations, IT
must handle the enabler role with sensitivity to each use case.
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TDWI CHECKLIST REPORT: RE THINK ING ENTERPRISE BI TO FIT A SELF-SERVICE WORLD
NUMBER TWO
UPDATE GOVERNANCE AND STEWARDSHIP TO EMBRACE
SELF-SERVICE BI AND ANALYTICS
Organizations are concerned that the spread of self-service BI and
analytics will lead to data chaos. The fear is that it could be a Wild
West where inexperienced users are accessing data sources of
unknown quality. They could be working with unsecured sensitive data
and developing analytical insights with no lineage to track (i.e., cannot
be validated). These fears could come true without proper governance
and data stewardship.
Well-architected enterprise BI and data warehousing environments
protect users from many of the dangers of the Wild West while
providing them with high-quality curated data. Enterprise
data warehouses can still play a key role, even as self-service
implementations expand, because they provide good data. TDWI
research finds that outside of spreadsheet data, most users of self-
service tools access data from a data warehouse managed by IT.
However, users are seeking new sources for data discovery and
analytics and are impatient with waiting for new data to be
incorporated into the existing data warehouse. Big data lakes and
cloud-based data sources are growing in part because users need
access to a wider variety of data. Unfortunately, these sources
are often not adequately governed—much less vetted for quality,
consistency, and completeness.
Thus, organizations need to examine current governance and data
stewardship procedures and make sure they account for the expanding
data environment. Governance policies focused on adherence to
regulations covering sensitive data use should be communicated
clearly to users. Governance must adapt to self-service BI and
analytics interaction with data sources that are not managed by IT.
Organizations should work with CoE and BICC organizations to set out
which data sources and types of user interactions must be monitored.
Governance and stewardship can address other important goals aimed
at improving user productivity and satisfaction. Initial ones to address
are improvement in data quality, consistency, and relevance.
In the shift to self-service BI and analytics, organizations often
overlook some procedures that were more obvious in an enterprise BI
environment. For example, organizations need to set up procedures for
how users promote the content they generate to production. It should
also be easy for users to share and reuse governed content such as
visualizations and analytical models. Data stewards should oversee
content promotion to ascertain which items are the most popular and
useful and therefore merit being scaled up for enterprise promotion.
Alternatively, stewards can see where users are having difficulty
developing content and need appropriate guidance.
3  TDWI RESE A RCH
NUMBER THREE
REVISE THE SEMANTIC LAYER TO SUPPORT SELF-SERVICE
INTERACTIVE REPORTING
Reporting remains the heart of BI despite industry talk that it is old
hat and on the way out. Reporting has merely become more diverse
over time as users seek new forms of communication with data that
better fit their requirements and take advantage of new technologies.
Today, many organizations have evolved enterprise BI reporting beyond
tabular reports and make greater use of dashboards, scorecards,
metrics, visualizations, maps, search, and natural-language-generated
analytics to improve user communication and sharing of data.
Reporting is increasingly Web-based, making it easier for users to
access reports and data from multiple platforms and mobile devices,
as well as for administrators to centrally manage reporting. Enterprise
BI platforms are also providing users with fresher data, often updated
several times a day depending on requirements.
Users become dissatisfied with enterprise BI reporting when
organizations stand pat and do not modernize it, particularly to
address demands for self-service capabilities. Not all users want
the ability to write their own reports; many would rather have IT,
power users, or automated technology do it for them so they can
concentrate on their business responsibilities. However, our research
finds that most users do want self-service capabilities for interactive
reporting and easier ability to create ad hoc reports, which can
consist of diverse personalized charts and visualizations to suit user
requirements. Self-service, interactive reporting features enable users
to view data and apply their chosen filtering, drill-down, and other
capabilities to examine data further. Organizations should evaluate
technologies that enable nontechnical users to address new questions
interactively and build visualizations in a self-service but governed
and guided fashion.
One of the advantages of mature enterprise BI and data warehouse
architectures is having a coherent and up-to-date semantic layer, from
which self-service BI and analytics can also benefit. A semantic layer
aligns higher-level business terms (e.g., customer or product) with the
data so that users can gain a complete view of all data relevant to
that term without having to know the underlying relational structure or
write SQL to access the data.
Diverse and distributed self-service technology use can make
development and maintenance of a semantic layer challenging and
complex. In the end, however, some form of semantic layer will save
users time by reducing confusion about data. Ad hoc interactive
reporting improves when there is a semantic layer to facilitate faster
access to multiple data sources.
Organizations should evaluate their existing enterprise BI and data
warehousing semantic layer. It may be too rigid to extend for ad hoc,
self-service BI and analytics use cases, not to mention potentially
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TDWI CHECKLIST REPORT: RE THINK ING ENTERPRISE BI TO FIT A SELF-SERVICE WORLD
heterogeneous environments of multiple tools and platforms. Rather
than provide semantics for every use case and scenario, some
organizations will choose to extend or create a thinner semantic
layer into which a variety of tools can integrate. Some BI tools have
their own semantic layers, so the task would be to integrate and
align these tool layers with the thinner enterprise layer. Developers
and data modelers can then either expand or vertically deepen
the definitions and integration of the layers depending on specific
business requirements.
NUMBER FOUR
BALANCE STANDARDIZATION AND CONSOLIDATION
WITH USER AGILITY
Self-service BI and analytics can help users become more productive
with data and improve data-driven decision making. Nonetheless,
when decentralized and not well coordinated, each self-service
technology implementation can become its own data silo. Barriers to
the standardization of data models, business and data definitions,
and semantic layers can become almost insurmountable. Faced with
these and other key concerns, such as governance, organizations will
often consider whether it is time for a major consolidation effort.
Most organizations have been there before. In order to establish their
current enterprise BI and data warehouse standard years ago, many
consolidated multiple BI systems and data marts into one enterprise
standard system. Is it time to do it again?
The problem is that organizations do not want to lose the agility gained
from distributed and democratized self-service BI and analytics in a
consolidation effort. They need to balance standardization with the
agility that self-service technologies can afford. Businesses are under
pressure to be more agile and use information effectively to support
fluid decision making and faster response to changing conditions. If a
consolidation effort undercuts an organization’s agility, business and
IT leadership need to evaluate if it is worthwhile and, if so, how to
consolidate in ways that benefit rather than harm business agility.
Here are three recommendations that can help organizations attain the
right balance:
Provide managed self-service that offers plenty of guidance.
Users want to do more on their own, but that doesn’t mean most
want to be left on their own. Our research finds that many choose
self-service tools primarily because they are frustrated with the
IT backlog. They still need IT guidance in choosing and blending
the right data sets, building good analytical models, and using
visualization to interpret results. IT BI teams should help users take
advantage of wizards and other automated guidance embedded in
many of the latest tools.
4  TDWI RESE A RCH
Consider invoking standardization through self-service
applications. Rather than standardizing on specific tools or on
individual reports and applications, organizations should look at
creating self-service applications that offer users standard choices
within them. Organizations can set up application parameters
that are expressed through having a good number of choices in
standardized drop-down boxes. Filters and sorts could be among
the parameterization choices, but the selectable choices could also
include, for example, x- and y-axis variables and levels of data
granularity. This approach can provide consistency while giving
users options.
Aim for less obtrusive IT management and governance. To avoid
getting in the way of user freedom, the IT approach to governance
should be less prescriptive and more enabling. IT can monitor which
data sets, reports, and other artifacts are most useful to a broader
number of users, and then base standardization on this information.
NUMBER FIVE
INTRODUCE SELF-SERVICE DATA PREPARATION CAREFULLY
As self-service BI and analytics tools spread, excitement over
their ease of use can wane once users confront data preparation
difficulties. Data preparation processes cover a range of activities
that begin with data ingestion and extraction, run through quality
improvement and profiling, and include transformation and other
types of structuring to get data ready for BI and analytics. It can
be slow, difficult, and unexciting work, but data preparation is
essential to BI and analytics.
From organization to organization, there is rarely one set sequence
of data preparation processes, which vary depending on the
use case and the skills and tools available to users and IT
staff. If users have no alternative, they will frequently prepare
their own data, often by using spreadsheets. This can lead to
inconsistencies in cleansing and defining the data and introduce
errors, all of which contribute to the “spreadsheet hell” common in
many organizations.
In most organizations, IT is responsible for data preparation for
enterprise BI and data warehouse systems. This includes data
quality and extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. However,
self-service BI and analytics users as well as data scientists are
seeking to personalize data access, integration, and preparation to
suit their projects. They want to include sources outside the data
warehouse (e.g., big data lakes) and need to be less dependent
on IT to perform data preparation for these new sources. Users
and data scientists often view ETL set up for enterprise BI and
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TDWI CHECKLIST REPORT: RE THINK ING ENTERPRISE BI TO FIT A SELF-SERVICE WORLD
data warehousing as too rigid and slow to suit their ad hoc
requirements.
Self-service data preparation—offered both as standalone tools
from third-party vendors and as integrated functionality within BI
and analytics solutions—can be helpful for improving self-service
BI and analytics user productivity and agility.
Tools are generally either browser-based or desktop-based; the
former make it easier for central administrators to monitor data
source usage, data lineage, and metadata inconsistencies, among
other issues.
Here are three recommendations for avoiding pitfalls with self-
service data preparation:
Develop a shared metadata resource. An earlier point in this
checklist emphasized the importance of a good semantic layer.
Metadata can proliferate as self-service BI and analytics expand, so
it is vital from an enterprise perspective to create a comprehensive
and consistent metadata repository or business glossary that can
serve as the hub of the semantic layer.
Organizations should evaluate technologies that can automate
collection and alignment of at least the subset of metadata that is
integral to shared BI and analytics. Organizations should ensure that
it can be centrally monitored. Users will be more productive if they
are not in constant conflict about metadata.
Integrate data preparation with governance. Self-service data
preparation could exacerbate the Wild West data chaos problem
discussed earlier and make governance more difficult. At the same
time, self-service data preparation technologies, especially if they
replace spreadsheet use, can help improve governance through better
data quality and knowledge about sources. Organizations should
make it a priority to integrate governance with data preparation.
Aim for higher levels of repeatability. One danger of self-service
data preparation (particularly desktop-based) is that every routine
will be a one-off that has to be done over again when there is a
new requirement or new data. Encourage reuse and repeatability;
make use of automation and Web-based administration in data
preparation technology to support these objectives.
5  TDWI RESE A RCH
NUMBER SIX
DEVELOP AN OPEN ARCHITECTURE TO MATCH WORKLOADS
WITH THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGIES
The popularity of self-service BI and analytics is just one of
several factors driving major changes in enterprise BI and data
warehousing. Big data is another force, with organizations deploying
combinations of open-source-based technologies from the Apache
Hadoop (and Spark) ecosystem as well as commercial technologies
to analyze vast quantities of structured, semistructured, and
unstructured data. Technologies are maturing to give users of self-
service BI and visual analytics tools more direct interactivity with
data stored in Hadoop files. Open source alone is another factor,
particularly for advanced analytics. Data scientists and analytics
application developers are expanding their toolsets to include open
source languages such as R and Python. Finally, there is cloud
computing, which is enabling organizations to be more “elastic”
to meet users’ immediate needs. Organizations can spin up BI and
analytics systems in the cloud without the usual long IT cycles for
on-premises systems deployment.
All these factors require organizations to take a fresh look at their
enterprise BI and data warehousing architecture. The added diversity
of these factors means that organizations need to look beyond
monolithic architectures and envision architectures with a wider
scope—that is, a unified or hybrid environment that uses a logical
data warehouse approach. The goal is a broad, open but cohesive
platform that can aim workloads at the appropriate technologies
and platforms. A hybrid open architecture uses industry-standard
application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable data
communication and movement from one platform to another, whether
on premises or in the cloud. The architecture must unify existing BI
and data warehouse frameworks with open source frameworks that
are being used to analyze and interact with Hadoop files.
A logical data warehouse consists of a virtual architectural layer
that sits on top of the hybrid architecture of the data warehouse
and other cloud- and on-premises data stores and can use
tools to provide views of data anywhere in the architecture.
A comprehensive semantic layer is critical to a logical data
warehouse, which complements the functions of a traditional
enterprise data warehouse by offering faster virtual views of any
type of data in the environment.
The key point in this step is that organizations should develop
a strategy for opening their architectures. Considerations about
governance, data quality, and the rest do not go away and must be
addressed in ways that fit the use case and workload. Not all use
cases and workloads will need the rigorous governance and structure
of a traditional single architecture for enterprise BI and data
warehousing. The strategy must have flexibility and openness to take
advantage of the potential of new technologies and methods.
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NUMBER SEVEN
REFRESH TRAINING TO FIT DIVERSE SELF-SERVICE
FINAL WORD
USER NEEDS

“Self-service” implies that users can do it themselves and therefore Self-service BI and analytics tools excite users with new capabilities
need far less training. Indeed, self-service technologies should for easier, more intuitive ways of working with data and informing
empower users to do more without IT handholding. Nevertheless, user decision making with quantitative information. However, the
even though BI and analytics tools are becoming easier to use, expansion in self-service means that organizations must rethink
it is not necessarily straightforward to understand and apply BI enterprise BI. Organizations do not want to lose what they have
and analytics techniques, particularly for nontechnical users. If gained from enterprise BI. With a solid strategy, they can incorporate
anything, the ease with which users can access and interact with self-service as part of a larger thrust to improve agility and enable
data increases the need for effective training and mentoring in the a broad, diverse base of users to be productive with data. This
practices of BI and analytics—that is, how to discover and interpret Checklist Report has covered seven key areas that are important for
relevant data and apply data insights to decision making. organizations to consider as they put together a strategy.
If users cannot apply BI and analytics practices within their roles
and responsibilities, they will not gain full value from the tools or
the company’s data assets. Thus, organizations should not look at
self-service tools deployment as an opportunity to save money on
training. Instead, they need to shift the training focus to helping
users learn and apply practices so they can achieve business gains
from tool capabilities.
Here are three recommendations:
Encourage BI teams to mentor users. Enterprise BI team personnel
have experience and wisdom they can share with business users.
Most BI teams report into IT and have personnel who are expert
in preparing data, querying and interacting with it, and building
visualizations such as dashboards. Organizations should facilitate
both formal and informal (e.g., “lunch and learn”) mentoring. BI
teams must be careful not to overwhelm nontechnical users with too
many technical details. They should listen to the business problems
users are trying to solve and then guide them in how to work with BI
and analytics in that context.
Make training specific to user roles and experience. Users and
their requirements are diverse. Some just need a simple way to
turn data into useful information so they can work with customers
to facilitate transactions or services. Some are making operational
decisions and need timely data presented in dashboards, while
others are conducting data science or making strategic decisions
based on deeper analysis. Training should be appropriate to different
types of users.
Encourage sharing of tips and success stories. Organizations
should help users learn from each other. Internal social media,
informal gatherings, and awards recognition are good ways for
organizations to make it easier and rewarding for users to share
what they have learned.

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ABOUT THE SPONSORS
www.informationbuilders.com
Information Builders is an innovative and customer-focused
software provider that delivers technology to harmonize, visualize,
operationalize, and monetize data. During our 40-year history, the
technology landscape has evolved and data has gotten bigger, but
our mission has remained the same: to help our customers deliver
better data and better analytics to more people, so they can make
better decisions and have better operations.
Our reputation for customer service excellence has garnered us the
highest honors, including the American Business Awards “Stevies.”
We listen to and work with our customers to help solve their
business problems and meet business goals. Their stories inspire us,
excite us, and drive us forward.
Every day millions of people use our WebFOCUS software for
business intelligence and analytics in thousands of different
ways. Their solutions often incorporate our iWay and Omni
data management products—which can be used for business
intelligence, operational process excellence, or other data
management requirements—to ensure accurate, unified, consistent
data for their key stakeholders.
7  TDWI RESE A RCH
sas.com/visualanalytics
SAS Visual Analytics is the flagship product for interactive, self-
service business intelligence and analytics. It allows business users
and analysts to visually integrate and explore data, design and share
interactive reports, and employ an array of easy-to-use analytics
capabilities for informed decision making.
For citizen data scientists and statisticians interested in predictive
analytics, SAS Visual Statistics (an add-on to SAS Visual Analytics)
can interactively explore data and build descriptive and predictive
models in tandem.
What does this mean for users?
• No matter the size of your organization or data, explore all
relevant data quickly, identify relationships, and make more
precise decisions faster than before. Self-service visual data
discovery puts insights within reach in a governed, reusable
manner.
• Quickly design reports and dashboards that are attractive and
meaningful, and then easily distribute them via Web, Microsoft
applications, or mobile.
• Build queries to perform joins, add calculated columns, subset
and sort data, load data in memory, and more with Web-based
data mashup and modeling capabilities.
• Interactively customize models—adding or changing variables,
removing outliers, etc.—and instantly see how those changes
affect outcomes.
• Right-size your environment with options that fit your needs.
Deploy on-site or in the cloud.
Learn more at sas.com/visualanalytics.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Stodder is senior director of TDWI
Research for business intelligence. He
focuses on providing research-based
insight and best practices for organizations
implementing BI, analytics, performance
management, data discovery, data
visualization, and related technologies and methods. He is the
author of TDWI Best Practices Reports and Checklist Reports
on data discovery, data visualization, customer analytics in the
age of social media, BI/DW agility, mobile BI, and information
management. He has chaired TDWI conferences on BI agility and
big data analytics. Stodder has provided thought leadership on
BI, information management, and IT management for over two
decades. He has served as vice president and research director
with Ventana Research, and he was the founding chief editor of
Intelligent Enterprise, where he served as editorial director for nine
years. You can reach him at dstodder@tdwi.org, @dbstodder on
Twitter, and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/davidstodder.
8  TDWI RESE A RCH
ABOUT TDWI RESEARCH
TDWI Research provides research and advice for BI professionals
worldwide. Focusing exclusively on data management and analytics
issues, TDWI Research teams up with industry practitioners
to deliver both broad and deep understanding of the business
and technical issues surrounding the deployment of business
intelligence and data warehousing solutions. TDWI Research
offers reports, commentary, and inquiry services via a worldwide
membership program and provides custom research, benchmarking,
and strategic planning services to user and vendor organizations.
ABOUT TDWI CHECKLIST REPORTS
TDWI Checklist Reports provide an overview of success factors for
a specific project in business intelligence, data warehousing, or
a related data management discipline. Companies may use this
overview to get organized before beginning a project or to identify
goals and areas of improvement for current projects.
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